Laurence Fishburne Admits He Had No Idea Who Doc Rivers Was Before Portraying Him in ‘Clipped’
FX on Hulu‘s latest series is tackling a sports scandal.
When the infamous Donald Sterling audio recordings hit the internet in 2014, it changed the landscape of the NBA and the role of social media in society.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the clip, where the then-Clippers owner can be heard making racist comments to his 31-year-old mistress, V. Stiviano. The incident, considered to be one of the biggest scandals at the time, incited a media frenzy, ultimately bringing to light Sterling’s history of racial discrimination and pushing him not only to sell the team, which he owned from 1981 to 2014, but also be hit with a permanent ban from the league.
Clipped, revisits the events that changed the sport’s history forever, honing in on the moments leading up to the incident, the aftermath and all that was uncovered in the process.
“I think the tonnage of all the information put together reveals a new way of looking at the story, and particularly in the landscape we have right now politically and socially and racially in the country,” executive producer and director Kevin Bray said to Blavity’s Shadow and Act. “So I think it’s a kind of explanation of, ‘How did we get here?’ And I think that’s an important thing to talk about and say. So in regards to the specificity of facts, I think a lot of people didn’t know all the behind-the-scenes of this story. And I think that’s pretty interesting and why people are intrigued.”
“I echo that sentiment entirely,” executive producer Gina Welch, who also serves as a creator and showrunner of the series, said. “I also think that, because we’re with these characters so intimately in the show, that part of what’s new about telling the story in this way is understanding why the characters are making the choices they’re making, and seeing sort of the chain of causation for each of them and understanding the environment in which the tape is recorded and produced in the context of each of these characters’ lives.”
The series reveals details of the scandal and allows viewers to relive not only the moments and how they affected everyone from Sterling (Ed O’Neill) to his wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver), his mistress, V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), then-Clippers head coach Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne), and key players on the team but also the rise of internet memes that are sprinkled throughout each episode.
“2013, 2014 — that’s when Twitter was becoming the singular place of deciding what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, who to listen to, who messed up,” renowned sports journalist Rembert Browne, who also serves as a writer on Clipped, said. “It was becoming this groupthink that comes from the kind of democratization of the internet where anyone gets a voice, but then you know, kind of left unchecked, it becomes this very messy world.”
“I think one of the places you see that in the show is just this idea of all of the inputs they are getting when it comes to like, ‘What are you going to do?’ You’ve got thousands upon thousands of people telling these people what they should have done or should not have done, and something I think we wanted to come through in the show is that it was impossible to escape that. Doc tried to get everyone to escape it, and it was just impossible.”
Becoming Rivers was a welcomed challenge for Hollywood veteran Fishburne, especially since he admitted not being privy to the sports world and not knowing how huge the story and Rivers were to the NBA before this role.
“I was aware of the story a little bit because I live in L.A., and it was a big story in L.A., obviously, but I’m not a sports fan, so I wasn’t familiar with all the players,” the Emmy and Tony-winning actor said. “For example, I had never heard of Doc Rivers’ name before. I had never heard Donald Sterling’s name before. I had never heard of these people, so I was ignorant of it all, but when I read, I was fascinated by all of them. They’re all very interesting people, very interesting characters. And they all have very different perspectives and points of view about what was happening.”
For the actors portraying the characters at the center of the scandal, joining a project like this was exciting because they’d already been interested in the subject when it happened just a decade ago.
“I was already riveted by the scandal at the time,” Weaver, who plays Sterling’s wife and longtime business partner Shelly, said. “I read it in the news. I read it in several newspapers, and I was fascinated by the story and appalled. I mean, it was shocking. Being a foreigner, I didn’t know a lot about basketball, but it got me interested in basketball as well. But when we explored turning it into a piece of fiction inspired by real events, it was wonderful the way the creative team knotted it out, you know, expanded on their story using imaginative situations, but a lot of it is dead set accurate to what happened.”
“I felt, for my process, I needed to look at V not as much through the lens of the scandal, but just as a character on the page,” Coleman added. “As a character, I just found her to be so interesting, so multifaceted. There was so much to draw from, and that’s really what attracted me to the project.”
Much like Fishburne, O’Neill recalled living through the scandal as an L.A. resident.
“When the scandal broke, I found myself talking to a lot of people who lived in his various apartment buildings,“ the Modern Family star said. “I was so surprised how many he owned all over Los Angeles. That was interesting to me that I would talk to them about what kind of landlord he was, and not too many were complimentary. That’s how I first heard about Donald Sterling.”
Clipped, based on the original podcast The Sterling Affairs, which details Sterling’s struggles as the owner of the Clippers, his marriage, and the tape that broke the story resulting in his lifetime ban from the NBA, is available for streaming on Hulu. The six-episode miniseries concludes on July 2.
